internet safety

Every parent knows that unsupervised kids can get into plenty of trouble online. They could unknowingly infect your computer with a virus, or even meet a child predator in a chat room. Kindergarten is a great age to instill safe internet practices in your kids.

As a parent, I'm always happy to find safe activities for my kids to do online, because if you make the computer the forbidden fruit, they will forever want it! So, keeping child internet safety in mind, educational activities are a great way to let the kids online. Plenty of parental supervision is always a good idea, but supplementing some of your homeschooling lessons with online resources is a great idea. You can find something interesting online to supplement just about any curriculum you're using at home, and it gives your kids valuable practice in navigating the internet safely.

foreign langauge for kindergarten

They say the best time to learn a foreign langauge is when you're young, so why not try teaching your kindergartener as you homeschool? Actually, there are plenty of "immersion" programs for preschool and kindergarten kids to learn a language in a school environment, but there's no reason homeschoolers can't be just as successful.

Along those same lines, speaking the language with another person is much preferable over speaking it into a computer. Many of the available computer programs are excellent, but reciting vocabulary words to yourself or the computer just doesn’t give the same quality of feedback as if you were speaking them to another person.

If you or someone in your family isn’t a fluent speaker of the language you want to teach, and you can’t find a native speaker to tutor your kids either, the foreign language computer programs are your only real alternative, and while not ideal, they do get the job done. Check your local library also for language resources to help along the way, and above all, stick with it! Persistence is the key to learning another language, and starting young can only help.